Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
The MTA is pleased to announce that Andrew Hodgson, Strategic Lead – Digitalisation, at Siemens has been appointed as Vice President of the Association. Andrew has been a member of the MTA Board for a number of years and also chairs the Association’s Technical Committee, which looks at activities in advanced manufacturing technologies, such as additive manufacturing, automation and industry Standards.
We are hosting a half day seminar on the 11th September 2019 at the Amazon facility in Coventry. The half day seminar will be run in conjunction with the AMT/4 – Industrial Data and Manufacturing Interfaces – BSI committee, who will provide experts speakers on the latest in data standards for manufacturing.
We will be closing the July edition of the MTA Business Survey early next week but there is still time to get your return back to us if you have not done so already. The online form at www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-jul19 is still available.
The data from Europe this week was as gloomy as that for the UK at the end of last week with three bits of bad news in the data for industrial production; there was a sharp fall in total output, led by the capital goods sub-sector and the steepest fall was in Germany. This fed through into the GDP data which showed that although it grew overall for both the Euro-zone and the EU28, the pace slowed compared to the start of the year and there was a quarter-on-quarter fall in GDP for Germany. In the UK, productivity (output per hour) declined as hours worked increased more quickly than gross value added. We also summarise the latest UK trade figures, although conclusions here are made difficult by distortions in trade levels this year from non-monetary gold.
Make UK’s National Manufacturing Conference, will return next year on the 25th February 2020, if you are interested in attend this event see below for more details.
Boris Johnson has instructed the Home Office and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to work with the scientific community to develop a new fast-track visa route for the brightest and best, with a view to launching it later this year. More details can be found within the Brief.
CBI are running a one day event on ‘Campaigning and how to influence’, MTA members can get a 30% discount to attend this event if you’re interested please see the story below for full details.
That’s all this week we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news and views, until then have a great weekend from everyone at the MTA.
